This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). The objective of this research award is to expand the sphere of application of impulsive control, and importantly, translate impulsive control from theory to practice. This will be achieved through investigation and experimental implementation of impulsive control in under-actuated dynamical systems. The main problems to be addressed are balancing, walking, and stair-climbing in bipeds; but swing-up control of the pendubot and acrobot will be investigated first. These are benchmark problems in under-actuated systems. The motivation for addressing these problems is to compare the results of this research with results in the literature and establish the advantages of impulsive control for these systems; implement impulsive control for these systems in experiments, which are relatively simple in terms of complexity; and understand the effect of impulsive control inputs on system behavior with the objective of learning to deal with impulsive forces arising from intermittent contact in bipedal locomotion and other robotic tasks.
Impulsive forces are not included in the set of admissible controls for most dynamical systems. By establishing the advantages of impulsive control of under-actuated systems, this research will initiate exploration of impulsive control for a wide range of problems such as orbital transfer of satellites, rapid maneuvering of missiles and underwater vehicles, and control of prosthetic devices. This award will have broad impact through integration of research and education, diversity, and outreach. It will provide research topics to graduate students and contribute towards the development of future generation engineers and academics. The research results will be integrated into select courses and published in archival journals and efforts will be made to increase the participation of minorities. The outreach component will include sharing results with researchers at federal government laboratories and collaboration with faculty in other universities.
